My commentary on China-Iran relations was posted to my internship's website, click here
Enjoy!

Have you ever been to a rock concert? If so, you may have an inkling as to the atmosphere inside an average Chinese restaurant. The Chinese actually have a specific word to describe it. That is how serious it is. The handy little word 热闹 (pronounced ruh-now) is used to describe the hectic and busy atmosphere of most eating establishments. However upon deeper inspection we see that the word is actually made up of the characters 热, which means heat and 闹, which means to make trouble. Hot and troublesome, ideal adjectives to describe the inside of a restaurant? If you have ever visited China I am sure you would agree. 

And now for someting completely different.
A commentary I wrote for my Internship. 
Enjoy.

China and Iran are two countries separated by language and culture but united through oil exports and shared distrust in the West. As China’s importance on the world stage increases, current political international trends have been irritating this important relationship. Most notably, the US has been pressuring China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, to pass new economic sanctions against Iran. These sanctions would be a direct response to Iran’s new uranium enrichments attempts, which it insists are purely for civilian interests. Although China does support the UN’s demand for Iran’s enrichment program in Qom to be halted because it violates rules of the IAEA, it will not easily agree to proposed sanctions. China’s expected inaction on the matter will only serve to reinforce its historical position that diplomacy should be favored over harsher solutions in Iran. 

Finally!!! The star post has arrived and you should be excited, I have worked over this one for a little while, just to make sure that I didn't forget anything.  I have hand selected the following list of items to best represent the great variety of food that I have eaten while here in China. It is important to remember, this is by no means everything (I could have written allot more). I had to draw the line somewhere however and so I decided to stop at 12 dishes. 


I suggest that you take your time on this post and treat it as a 12 course meal, as it is long, detailed, and will definitely make you hungry (if I have done my job correctly).

Get your Chopsticks out...
Click read more to start the feast. 

Never has my whiteness become more apparent to me than in China’s capital. Simply put, it is very easy to play the game “one of these things is not like the other” in Beijing, as being white and very tall with short naturally curly hair (the Chinese love their perms) can attract much attention. Having the racial roles completely reversed, really opens my eyes to daily undertones that I otherwise was oblivious to in white America. Let my just say, that this new perception of the world can become very emotionally exhausting. Every Monday and Wednesday I wake up at 8am and prepare to venture out into Beijing, arriving at my internship at around 9am. In order to go out alone I need to mentally prepare myself by creating a mental buffer for the 60 minutes journey. At 8:15 I hop on the metro (bumping my head on one of the really low handle bars) and I’m immediately surrounded by Chinese people for a solid 20 minutes . The energy of being in a cramped space completely surrounded by Non-whites is so foreign to me, it is almost like an intellectual and emotional overload. Although no one says anything and only a handful of people will really stare, I can feel the small tingle of an emotion that hardens at the pit of my stomach as if I can just read everyone’s mind in the subway car. Different. The feeling is that simple. After getting out of the subway and walking another 20 minutes to my internship (and a few more stares later) I find myself tired and slightly drained. 

If I were to blindfold you and lead you into the heart of Shanghai, you would swear you were not in China. Although Beijing is nice, I could see myself living in Shanghai becuase it just has that perfect blend of East and West. It seriously reminded me of New York, just as nice, vivid and expensive (for China's standards). Shanghai was noticeably more expensive, even for a foreigner like me. While meals in Beijing cost on average 20 Yuan in Shanghai the average was 70 yuan (which still works out to only 10 USD, so its like...? really?). Because China's extravegant, luxurious, expensive and most modern city was made inexpensive to us through the exchange rate we decided to live it up. This was the theme for our entire Shanghai trip (click read more)

July  4th is no match for China's New Year's celebrations. One person in our program actually lost hearing in one of his ears because there were so many fireworks and they were just so loud. 


China LOVES fireworks. It is more than a week since the new years and I am still hearing fireworks outside my internship right now


On New Years Eve our group was in the unknown city of Taiyuan. First of all, there were literally firework vendors at every single corner selling every type of fun explosive/fire device possible. Walking into a firework vendor's tent/stall was like walking into a colorful candy shop, filled with thousands of doo-dads and knick-knacks. Our group must have purchased at least 30 firworks, of every variety. Some were roman candles, sparklers, boxes that acted as rocket launchers as they each housed about 20 fireworks with 20 individual tubes built into the box to launch each firwork in a sequence. Some were in the shapes of tanks and when you lit them they would shoot out sparks from the turret. Others were simple fireworks with twisting wings attached, so that when lit they would emit sparks forcing the entire contraption to twirl around like a helicopter and take off from the ground ending in a loud pop about 40 feet in the air. Then there were the famous red firecrackers, which are by far the LOUDEST and most BELOVED by the chinese people (foto after the break)

This past week was the Chinese new year as you may or may not know, and therefore about 1/5 of the world  (ie. all chinese people) were travelling. As part of our program we went to Shanxi province (and visted the towns of Taiyuan and Pingyao). Travelling entirely by bus, first we took a 10ish hour drive to Taiyuan (one of the many unknown heavily populated cities of china) and stayed there for new years eve. Then after Taiyuan and the most amazing new years ever, we travelled  another couple hours to the ancient town of Pingyao. After two nights in this ancient town, we left at 9am in the morning and returned to Beijing arond 5pm. At 10pm the same night I boarded a sleeper train headed to Shanghai. 
As you can see, my Chinese New Years break was very jam-packed.

(Move the map around above to see exactly where I am talking about)...continue reading after the break (click read more)

So if any of you want to know about my weekly schedule I decided to post it, so that you all can  see just how hectic my Beijing life is  :p In other news, I am going to Shanghai in about a week, so stay tuned for some cool posts :)

Schedule:

Monday - Internship 9am-5pm
Tuesday - Chinese 9am-12pm, Doing Business in China 1:30pm-4:20pm
Wednesday - Internship 9am-5pm, China in Transformation 6:30pm-9:20pm
Thursday - Chinese 9am-12pm
Fruday - Chinese 8:30am-10:30am

Disclaimer: I know its tempting to click on the fotos link at the top of the screen and skip ahead, but first read this and I promise you will get much more out of the pictures.

This passed weekend I finally arrived at the place of places. It was an auspicious event as I finally experienced the illustrious and foreboding Forbidden City (like that phrase?). All in all, I found the whole thing to be slightly different than what expected, however it was no less awesome (not in the sense of amazing, but in the original sense – full of awe). Just for reference, a clumsy and quick translation of the signage of the front gate says: “The 10,000 year unity of the Chinese people – long live the people of the world (another) 10,000 years.” (written above in red chinese characters). So you can tell that these people mean business, they are not messing around (and you wonder where Chinese pride comes from?).

 Back to the American Students. So, our program was dropped off by bus about 20 minutes away from the main gate of the city. From there we moseyed on up to the main entrance of the city. Slowly marching upon the main gate, I felt like we were creeping up on a sleeping giant, as these immense red structures grew bigger and bigger, and wider and wider. It was surreal. Suddenly I was in line to go through the main gate and guess what I saw (you can try to guess, but I doubt you’ll hit the bull’s eye). So I walked in and the first thing I saw was a basketball Court.